Tek4L

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Could be useful in small group learning situations I suppose.

http://www.sloodle.com/

A combining of Moodle and Second Life. An interesting idea, but I am not convinced that this type of integration is the best way forward. If anything really useful and interesting is going to happen in elearning then I think we need to drop the current LMS paradigm completely rather than try and combine it with other technologies.

Saw a post from an ed technology list today that made mention of a blogging plugin that someone is working on for Blackboard 7. It is to include the ability for students and lecturers to have a single blog that they can use to contribute posts to the various courses they are members of - the specs sounded quite good, but what would be more interesting is allowing students to use their own blogging tool to contribute to courses.

If a student already has a blogger blog, or some other existing blog, then why make them contribute using a blogging tool that is built into the lms, they should instead be able to input the rss feed from their existing blog for articles with the relevant course tag

The other problem is that lots of courses are going to want students to blog because it is the trendy thing to do (just paper based reflective journals reinvented really), without much thought about the real pedagogical value, and restricting it to an lms/course based system will just reinforce the fact that it is just some boring assessment criteria that 'has' to be done to pass the course, rather than showing it as useful ongoing professional development/social networking/life long learning tool.

Worth a read

education-3.0-V3.pdf

Still on the topic of PLEs - an interesting read from Mike Malloch
. Among other things he states “let’s be very careful to learn from the simplicity, clarity, user-centricity, restraint and attention to detail that characterise web2.0.” and “There are some wonderful applications, services and mash-ups out there,
but existing services and applications are not quite enough to support
the features we can envisage learners having access to in a PLE. Only
by determined experimentation can we begin to characterise and address
the gaps.”

My concern though is that all this detailed observation and experimentation to try and evolve a PLE will in fact change the state of web 2.0 for the learner, and that we will never know what sort of a learner centred environment may have evolved if we had been able to resist the urge to open the box and look into it

http://electronicportfolios.org/blog/2006_06_14detail.html

Comments here from Helen Barrett along the same lines as previous post about PLEs - seems to be some agreement (http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=34778, http://www.darcynorman.net/2006/06/16/on-eporfolios-and-ownership) that efforts to enforce digital portfolio completion as a form of assessment is a recipe for sucking any creativity and ownership out of the process. As mentioned in the previous post, the same danger is there with the PLE concept.

Don�t start with the institutions � the issues become very complex and a PLE initiative/project will quickly drown

Stephen Powell: Personal Learning Environments experts meeting

I have to agree with Stephen on this point. This has happened with eportfolios - they are largley being looked at from the institutional perspective, and in most cases the possibility for creativity, lifelong learning, etc. that a portfolio presents is sucked out and replaced by a set of rigid assessment parameters, and the eportfolio becomes nothing more than a form filling exercise.

If the same thing happens with the PLE concept, then it will move from that wonderful free and organic concept of each person cobbling together the things that work for them at any particular time, a browser here, a newsreader there, a little bit of flickr, a little bit of flock, some blogger thrown in for good measure, and will be turned into some bloated application that students have to download, or log into weekly, and enter all the correct information in, in the correct week, and then submit a dump file, or screen shot of it at the end of the course for assessment to show that they have been learning in their personal environment in the way the institution wanted them to

Worth a listen -

http://www.knownet.com/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell/entries/1149667974

I agree with Graham's thoughts that we need to do some serious thinking before we launch into creating PLE applications, which may just limit and put walls around a learner in the same way that LMS systems do.

Some more thoughts on the future of LMSs

http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/archives/002429.html

Following on from my previous post, Scott Wilson's latest presentation has some good ideas about the future of learning environments.

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20060408223522